[crow]

And then they really could find a faerie to make a bargain with, and sell the people they didn't like for gold and riches...

"Let's see where it goes," said Kip at once following the direction that he had seen the flakes moving in. Behind him, Milo looked at him with surprise for a moment, before being forced into running just to keep up.

"Kip! Wait! We don't know where we're going!" he said. And it was true, they didn't--- at least, not anymore.

[Bonus Thread 43]

[crow]

Kip did stop for a moment to look around, get his bearings, in hopes of proving Milo wrong about that, but he couldn't. Nothing looked familiar in a specific kind of way anymore. He couldn't see any landmarks or anything like that. It did still look like the backwoods that he was familiar with, but only in a vague sense that it seemed like these were the right kinds of trees, in the right thickness... Where they were, exactly, that was much more of a mystery.

[Bonus Thread 44]

[crow]

But it didn't daunt him much, even though he had noticed. This just meant that they had come further into the backwoods than they had ever managed before, didn't it? "If we're slow we might miss them," said Kip. "We can just follow our footprints to find the way out. See?" He pointed back at the way they came, where a clear trail of footprints through the otherwise fresh and unbroken snow greeted them.

Milo looked hesitant for a moment before sighing and nodding.

[Bonus Thread 45]

[crow]

Kip grinned, and resumed running, though he did slow down a little so Milo could keep up without too much effort on his part. In his mind he was already practicing the things he was going to say to the faerie when he found one, running through a list of people he wanted spirited away...

But what they saw wasn't a faerie, but a fish.

This time it was Kip who stopped cold in his tracks. But unlike Milo, he didn't keep anyone in suspense.

[Bonus Thread 46]

[crow]

Immediately his finger flew out, pointing at the thing that he had seen--- a fish swimming through the air as if it were water. "Look! It's a fish, or... something." His statement had started out loud and confident, only to trail off as the fish rounded a bend around a tree and disappeared entirely.

Plus now that he was hearing himself, it did sound pretty absurd. 'Look, a fish' indeed... They were in the middle of the woods, and the only water in sight was frozen on the ground around them.

[Bonus Thread 47]

[crow]

"Did you see something?" said Milo. He didn't question what exactly Kip had seen, not directly, but the way he'd chosen to phrase his questions was proof enough that he didn't really believe that it was a fish. But then, could Kip really blame him? Kip himself had just been thinking about how stupid it sounded just now.

"I did, but... Well, maybe it'll come around again," said Kip. Maybe it was an illusion. Faerie magic was full of illusions, glamours that made them look different, that changed leaves into gold...

[Bonus Thread 48]

[crow]

Or maybe he was just going crazy and seeing things. Maybe it had just been a trick of the light, what little there was around here.

He was slightly discouraged, but only slightly. The snow was still strange, and they still had that lead to follow. With that in mind, he begun running again. Who knew when the snow would go back to normal? Maybe all of this would disappear just like the fish one moment, and they would have come all the way out here for nothing.

[Bonus Thread 49]

[crow]

But maybe fortune was smiling on Kip today. Not long after, he saw it again, and this time he had the sense to point it out without saying what he thought it was. This time Milo looked up in time to see it too, a flash of silver that drifted through the air, in and out of view as it darted between the trees.

Milo stopped, and Kip did too. The silver whatever it was disappeared, and the two exchanged a look. For a moment, neither of them even dared to say anything.

[Bonus Thread 50]

[crow]

It was Kip who broke the silence. It usually was, with this sort of thing. He didn't like to be quiet very much, even when the situation made him briefly speechless; it didn't suit him. But even when he spoke, it was quiet, almost reverent. "Did you see that?" he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Milo nodded, disbelief written all over his features. His eyes were wide, his cheeks slightly flushed from running about. "It... It really did look kind of like a fish," he said.

[Bonus Thread 51]

[crow]

He didn't come out and say that it was one, but Kip could understand that. It didn't make sense for it to be one. What kind of fish swam through the sky like that?

... Unless they really weren't in the backwoods anymore? Kip looked around hurriedly, half expecting to see the trees around him changing into some kelp forest or something. But the trees stayed trees, and come to think of it, they were still breathing, weren't they? At least, he thought they were...

[Bonus Thread 52]

[crow]

He took a deep breath just to be sure, but it sure didn't feel like water filling up his lungs. He'd gone swimming often enough, and been thrown in suddenly enough when he'd still been learning, that he knew the difference with this sort of thing. He knew how it felt, and this wasn't water.

"Maybe it was just a weird... bird," said Kip, but his heart wasn't in it. He liked to watch birds, and they really didn't move like that. They weren't shaped like that either, for that matter.

[Bonus Thread 53]

[Adelie]

i'm mostly going to be rp'ing with myself in the last few hours but feel free to mention me!

Whoever came up with this assignment must've been a nutjob.

To be fair, Ven knew exactly who the culprit was - her art professor, while in possession of a demeanor kind and patient enough to rival a saint, had unfortunately paired that with a similarly divine disconnect from reality; evidently, she was blissfully unaware of such concepts as snow or frostbite that might pose a challenge for students attempting to complete a six-hour life drawing assignment in the dead of winter.

But she'd never been a stickler for assigning blame; besides, complaining wouldn't make her fingers any warmer or her lips any less wind-chapped. Instead, she'd picked up her sketchpad and pens, took a few turns down into trails by her dorm, and then maybe took just a few more unfamiliar turns to end up - here.

There's a lot to be said about here.

It's not that she'd call herself much of an urban explorer, but she liked to fancy herself aware of her surroundings, at least; other students at her university - specifically one student she was thinking of - might only notice a new coffee shop after walking past it every day for a month, or might never even have thought to explore the fields and ravines stretching behind the main campus, but she'd spent her afternoons around town, compiling a mental atlas obscura of sorts.

Nowhere in there did she remember this. People often said that weather - a heavy rain, a thick covering of snow - reinvent a landscape, changing it so drastically as to be unrecognizable, but that couldn't possibly make up for a statue, an entire lake springing up out of nowhere.

That's not getting into the floating fish, of course. Those, she doesn't have the slightest hint of an explanation for.

[bonus thread - 1]

[Adelie]

What's there to do, then?

She'd come out here because she'd felt bereft of inspiration; the assignment had asked for a study of some scene from nature, and while she'd certainly been tempted to just curl up under her blankets, in her warm and reasonably insulated dorm room, and sketch the potted succulent on her windowsill, she'd had a distinct suspicion that didn't exactly count - and besides, there wasn't anything interesting about the little bundle of spiky leaves currently squatting under her blinds.

Especially not when she'd already drawn it two or three times for similarly loose interpretations of previous assignments.

But there's nothing she can work with here, either. Snow-capped pines and falling snow she could use; the mirror-like lake surface and even the man-made coils of the carved dragon statue could be an interesting touch to a scene. Floating koi, though? If she turned in a 'life drawing' of those, her professor, bless her kind heart, would probably call her in for a check-up on if she'd been feeling well, if she'd been sleeping well, if she'd been having any problems with discerning reality from fiction recently.

With a sigh, Ven plopped herself onto a slightly clearer patch of ground, looking somewhat despondently at the sky; a tiny koi, barely the length of her index finger, floated right in front of her eyes, close enough to touch. On a whim, she exhaled gently onto it - startled, the minuscule fish fluttered its fins uselessly, then darted off.

That made her smile. She couldn't help herself.

[bonus thread - 2]

[crow]

From the look on his face as he listened to what Kip was saying, Kip could tell that Milo didn't really believe it either. But whatever it could be, it didn't seem like there was an easy explanation for it. The possibility of some sort of fey involvement was seeming more and more likely all the time.

"Maybe we'll see it again," said Milo. "Then we'll know for sure." Or at least they would get a better, second look at it, anyway.

[Bonus Thread 54]

[crow]

The first one might have been a fluke, a trick of the light. There wasn't very much light to go on out here, away from the lurid orange of the street lamps.

But even as he thought that, there was something that Kip remembered. It wasn't something he particularly wanted to remember, since ti just complicated the details all the further, and their situation was inexplicable enough as it was. He really thought it was strange, and it didn't make any sense, but...

[Bonus Thread 56]